Twenty-five million albums and twenty years after it neglected to review Appetite for Destruction, Rolling Stone's current issue features Guns n Roses--the real version with the guy with the top hat and not the faux version with the guy with the chicken bucket--on the cover (What? Lindsey Lohan wasn't available?). Along with FHM-style models, Rolling Stone has featured on its cover in 2007 The Police, Pink Floyd, James Brown, and Keith Richards. Hello! It's 2007. Anybody home? Alas, I much prefer these relics to current monstrosities Fall Out Boy and Panic at the Disco (do both have obligatory exclamation points in their names?) who (dis)graced RS covers earlier this year too.

Anyhow, I say "greatest hard-rock album" advisedly. AC/DC's "Back in Black" is similiar to Appetite in that it can and does pass for a greatest hits album. It's all killer, no filler, as they say. Several Led Zeppelin albums, IV and Houses of the Holy come to mind, also are top-tier hard-rock albums. Methinks Appetite, though, is about as close as one gets to hard-rock perfection.

Appetite for Destruction is proof that, particularly for debut albums, the notion of getting out of the gate fast is overrated. Its weakest year in terms of sales was probably its first. By July of 1988, the album had sold 500,000 copies, or, put another way, less than two percent of its eventual take. Why so slow getting out of the blocks? An in-your-face album cover featuring a robot attempting to rape a woman probably turned some people off (Ya think?). Many of the songs contained profanity, memorably the line that followed "You get nothing for nothing if that's what you do..." You can't play that on the radio, can you? The marketing of the band, I remember, was a bit confused too. Guns n Roses was a hard rock band in the midst of the golden age of hair metal. The temptation to present the band as a hair metal act was strong, as evidenced by Axl's teased-out, Aquanet hairdo in the band's initial video, "Welcome to the Jungle." Alas, I fell into the trap of initially dismissing Guns n Roses as a hair metal act. But I, like millions of others, figured out that they were not Poison, Cinderella, Bullet Boys, or any of their ilk.

I figured that out by listening to Appetite for Destruction. What stuck out upon hearing the album for the first time was that the single, "Welcome to the Jungle," was the worst song on the album. If "Welcome to the Jungle," what would be the strongest track on any of a number of contemporary albums, was the weakest track on this album, then Guns n Roses had to be something special. I've since revised my low opinion of "Welcome to the Jungle" ("Anything Goes," "Paradise City," and You're Crazy" are certainly weaker), which was never really low but instead a reflection of my high opinion of what followed, but at the time it really struck me because the expectation would be that the rest of the album should be inferior to the single. With Appetite, it was the reverse.

What makes Appetite so good?

There is a sonic and lyric consistency. The guitar and bass is dark in "My Michelle," and so, appropriately, are the lyrics: "Your daddy works in porno/Now that mommy's not around/She used to love her heroine/But now she's underground/So you stay out late at night/And you do your coke for free/Drivin' your friends crazy/With your life's insanity." The opening cowbell and guitar are frantic in "Nighttrain," and so are the words Axl sings: "Wake up late honey put on your clothes/Take your credit card to the liquor store." The Bo-Diddley beat of "Mr. Brownstone" reflects a party dynamic, which, even within the cautionary tale of partying too much, is there: "The show usually starts around seven/We go on stage around nine/Get on the bus about eleven/Sippin' a drink and feelin' fine." And so on.

The album reflects a time, a phenomena, and a place, Los Angeles's hard rock/metal scene in the mid 1980s. The fact that Guns n Roses lived what they sang about gave them street credibility. Rumors of drug dealing, pimping, and even hustling surround members of the band. Izzy Stradlin remains the only member of Guns n Roses who graduated high school. Duff McKagan was rarely coherent in any interview during GNR's heyday, which made later news of his pancreas bursting the least surprising event in history. Steven Adler's drug-induced stroke, which has impaired his speech but not his drumming, was no shock either. Stradlin urinating in the aisle of a commercial flight, Slash and McKagan's profane acceptance speech at the American Music Awards, and Rose's involvement in a riot all added to their legend. In rap parlance, they kept it real. If you can believe the Rolling Stone cover story, even the moans and gasps on "Rocket Queen" aren't faked.

It also helped that, during a time when rock transitioned from larger-than-life personalities to meek, everyday people, Guns n Roses remained a thousand-feet tall. They never cut their hair. Axl Rose donned chest protectors, kilts, biker gear, and other costume-party outfits. He screamed "rock star." Slash, to this day, milks the Cousin-Itt mop and oversized top hat. He's an icon. Even Izzy Stradlin's anti-image image, which helped quiet rock when Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, and other successive bands cultivated it in the face of the giant personalities of rap, worked when juxtaposed with his more colorful bandmates. Post-GNR, rockers sought imageless anonymity. That wasn't Guns n Roses.

Appetite for Destruction is, in a word, rebellion, capturing what rock n roll is supposed to be about. Sex, drugs, violence, and other taboo subjects dominate. The man singing encapsulated what parents, teachers, and clergy told kids not to be. With his reincarnations in Tupac Shakur and Eminem, Axl Rose proved the prototype bad boy. He, and his band, were out of control. They were dangerous. They were without authority. Is it any wonder so many kids loved them?

Keyboards infect on just one track that I can think of, and even on Paradise City the intrusion is slight. Other than Izzy acting like a drug dealer and Slash acting like a drunk in Welcome to the Jungle, the album's three videos featured performance-based clips. None of the videos featured dolphins, or polished Victoria's Secret supermodels named Stephanie, or three Axls in the same shot, or Axl looking at his grave, or Slash driving a car off a cliff, or any such excess stupidity. Ballads, which like keyboards mar some of GNR's later works, appear, but do so in a hard rock, instead of a power ballad, form. "Sweet Child O' Mine," "Think About You," and "Rocket Queen" might very loosely be classified as ballads, but you forget that as you listen. They mesh seemlessly with the grit that surrounds. Nothing against November Rain, but thank goodness the record company coaxed Axl into leaving it for a later album. Appetite doesn't slow down.

The distinct influences of each member made for a potent mix. Izzy brought a Stonesish feel, heard unmistakably on his solo records and subtly on Appetite. Steven Adler brought an off-balance swing to drumming that reminds me of Kenney Jones on old Faces albums. He was not the drum machine his successor sounded like, and that's a good thing. Duff was a punk, and his occassional use of the bass as a lead instrument alerted the listener that a hair band GNR was not. Axl's dancing was Davy Jones, but his voice was Rob Halford (the banshee screaming on "Welcome to the Jungle") or Jim Morrison (that deep bass on It's So Easy). Slash's guitar came from the seventies, his look came from outer space. In other words, it wasn't Axl and the Roses, but five talented musicians bringing something to the table. Guns n Roses was bigger than the sum of its parts.

This past weekend, three parts (Izzy, Steven, and Duff) of Guns n Roses , with a fourth part (Slash) observing offstage, reunited to celebrate Appetite for Destruction's twentieth anniversary. The predictable inability of the original Guns n Roses to stay together only enhanced their legend. It was, like so much that is powerful, a combustable mix. Twenty years later, fans want the original to get back together more than ever--a sentiment that grows the longer they stay apart.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service searched the Girdwood, Alaska home of Senator Ted Stevens on Monday. The Associated Press noted, "The Justice Department has been looking into the seven-term senator's relationship with a wealthy contractor as part of a public corruption investigation." Makes sense. Stevens blocked a bill seeking to disclose information on federal spending and contracts, a year after threatening to resign from the senate if congress blocked his infamous "bridge to nowhere"--a Golden Gate-sized bridge connecting an island of fifty to a mainland of a few thousand. How ironic it would be if a man who has done so much to increase the burdens of the IRS upon ordinary Americans feels the oppressive power of the tax collectors.

She calls them "public servants." We know them as bureaucrats. "I think just like our military academies, we need to give a totally all-paid education to young men and women who will serve their country in a public service position," Hillary Clinton told a South Carolina audience. Will they awake to taps at 5 a.m.? Will they have curfew? Will freshmen get the plebe treatment? I doubt that is what Hillary Clinton has in mind. We serve bureaucrats. They don't serve us. Why do people need further inducements to high-paid Washington jobs that facilitate higher-paid Washington jobs in think tanks and lobbying firms? We call soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines "servicemen" because they get paid less and sacrifice more. They serve. It's insulting, and indicative of a state-worshipping worldview, to equate military service with the "public servants" who act as if we are their servants.

Hillary Clinton knows thyself. The letters released by a high school friend (Is anything private anymore?) detail an introspective Hillary that is at once refreshing and disturbing. "Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals?" Hillary wrote in 1967. "How about a compassionate misanthrope?" Hillary has always loved humanity. The humans, on the other hand, have never been high on her list. Compassionate misanthrope? Yes.

Did you catch Rod Dreher's list of things he no longer believes because of the Iraq debacle? Items on his list include: "I am no longer confident that I can discern when emotion is affecting my judgment unduly" and "I no longer have confidence in the ability of our military, or any military, to solve deep cultural and civilizational problems through force alone." The post-invasion candor is appreciated. One wishes other hawks could be so pensive. I can't offer any such list because, unlike Dreher and other conservatives, I always opposed the Iraq war. I felt obliged to voice my opposition, when doing so was extremely unpopular, on the Fox News Channel, on conservative talk radio, and before audiences of College Republicans. This wasn't exactly friendly territory for an anti-war stance, but it should have been. Conservatives have a proud tradition of opposition to adventurous wars, and Republicans have a proud tradition of ending wars that liberals start. From skepticism of "trust us we're the government" assurances, to opposition of big-government interventionism whether at home or abroad, to distaste for aggressive warfare, to disbelief that cultural institutions are for export, to contempt for utopianism, my conservative principles (as well as prudence and the facts) led me to vocally oppose the Iraq War and its architects' grandiose ambitions long before it started. Why did the principles of so many other conservatives lead them to opposing conclusions on Iraq?

"Systems always breed more systems; when new liberating movements arose in England and on the continent during the 17th and 18th centuries, they took the familiar European form of anti-systems. Thus, 'the Enlightenment,' which claimed to free men from superstition and from the dogma of old authority and petrified thought, itself acquired much of the rigidity and authoritarianism of what it set out to combat. The European Enlightenment was in fact little more than the confinement of the mind in a prison of 17th- and 18th-century design. The new 'rationalism'--which Europeans boasted was their new freedom--was the old human dogmatic servitude."
--Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, 1958

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney says Democratic presidental frontrunner Hillary Clinton's ideas mean "out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx." I object on two grounds: Hillary Clinton is not a Marxist; Mitt Romney is no Adam Smith free-marketeer.

Who knows what lies beneath the tripe that obscures a politician's real beliefs? All have concrete interests, but few have rock-hard principles. But Hillary Clinton's senate record leaves little evidence of Marxist beliefs. If she harbors such ideas, her voting record doesn't reflect it. The overuse of "Marxist" as a pejorative by conservatives against liberals shakes the stability of the term's meaning. Marxist has become a designation for someone conservatives don't like. There are excellent reasons for disliking Hillary Clinton's program, such as she has one beyond attaining personal power, but her turning over the keys of industry to the workers is not one of them. A Marxist believes in a materialist interpretation of history, state control of the means of production, the notion that profit is theft against wage earners, violence as the means to attain political power, and the inevitability of Marxism. This vibe doesn't radiate from Hillary Clinton's rhetoric, does it?

Not that Hillary reminds anyone of Adam Smith. She harbors many, many idiotic ideas. Her mid-'70s comparison of marriage and the family to slavery and Indian reservations, for instance, closely resembled The Communist Manifesto's promise to liberate children from parental exploitation. "Many of you are well enough off that the tax cuts may have helped you," went one of her most unforgettable remarks. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." The whole notion of "It Takes a Village" emits a collectivist spirit. Her plan to nationalize health care was certainly scary, but it was a mere plan whereas Mitt Romney's scheme to force health insurance upon everyone is Massachusetts law.

Mitt Romney championed coercive, universal health insurance legislation in Massachusetts. It is corporate welfare, in that it requires every citizen in the Bay State to buy a product (health care) from one industry (insurance). If an individual cannot afford insurance, the government will, with money taken from everyone else, pay the insurance company. In forcing individuals to buy health insurance, the law will certainly drive up the price of health care. It usurps individual choice by mandating behavior the state, in blanket fashion, decrees right for everyone. But for some people, e.g., robust young men, health insurance is usually a waste of money (even when the price of peace of mind is factored in). Why do health insurance companies make so much money if health insurance is such a great deal for individuals? It's gambling, and in gambling the house generally wins. When everybody is forced to play, the house really wins. Romney's law punishes anyone without health insurance by removing their individual tax exemption on annual state income tax filings and by issuing a monthly fine for those who haven't shown proof of insurance. Guilty until proven innocent, I guess. It is an unfunded mandate on individuals and employers. It is a burden on taxpayers footing the bill for freeloaders.

Romney's law is anathema to anyone who loves liberty, just as Hillarycare was anathema to liberty lovers in the early 1990s. The problem is that Republicans have rejected the tradition of freedom that reigned from Goldwater through the Contract With America. If Phil Gramm were dead, I'd say he's rolling in his grave. Phil Gramm, thankfully, is alive, but the free market principles he relied upon to defeat Hillarycare are dead within the GOP. The popularity of the former Massachusetts governor among self-proclaimed "conservatives" is proof of this.

Hillary Clinton is no Karl Marx. Mitt Romney, you are no Adam Smith, either.

There are people who still believe authoritarianism in the economic realm needn't infect freedom in the personal realm. By economic authoritarianism, I refer to socialism, a philosophy in which state managers usurp personal decisions on economic questions. Whenever the state assumes power in economics, it always seems to assume power in other areas--speech, religion, private firearm ownership, education, etc. Conversely, when individuals, and not the government, control their economic destinies, freedom is generally widespread. Pocketbooks and speech, for instance are less free in Europe than in America, and less free in China than in Europe. There is a relationship between economic freedom and personal freedom, even though socialists insist that there isn't. Rather than separating the two into artificial categories, it's better to say that economic freedoms are personal freedoms. In Venezuela, economic freedoms have been curtailed along with personal freedoms. In the latest example of the nation's slide, Hugo Chavez, warning that foreigners who come to Venezuela and criticize him will be expelled, asked: "How long are we going to allow a person, from any country in the world, to come to our own house to say there's a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant, and nobody does anything about it?" Venezuelans no longer possess such a right, so it's unsurprising that Chavez would deny foreigners the right to air negative assessments of him and his regime. By not allowing someone to call him a tyrant, isn't Hugo Chavez making the case that he is a tyrant?

Few Americans fit the French's stereotype of "ugly Americans" and few Frenchmen fit the Americans' stereotype of "lazy Frenchmen." Christine Lagarde, France's finance minister, neither fits nor likes the national stereotype. "France is a country that thinks," she explained to the National Assembly. "There is hardly an ideology that we haven't turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves." Work smarter, not harder is usually good advice. But for the chronically unemployed, the dole-takers, and the grad students for life that seem to disproportionately burden the French economy, the simple advice of work will do.

Last weekend, this era's most spectacular fighter retired. Don't mistake "spectacular" for "elite." Arturo Gatti was never an all-time "great" boxer. He was something more special: a fighter of great fights, a great prize fighter, a filler of seats. Four times he participated in a Ring magazine fight of the year. This weekend, this era's best boxer displayed why, even at 42 years of age, he is still one of the best pound-for-pound boxers in the world. Consider the level of competition that Bernard Hopkins has bested: Felix Trinidad, Glenn Johnson, Oscar De la Hoya, Antonio Tarver, Winky Wright. I did not catch his pay-per-view victory over Wright because Hopkins has been more the technician than the prize fighter--the anti-Gatti if you will--in recent years. (Winky, too, is a boring, no power/all defense type of fighter). Hopkins' power is gone, but his boxing skills have gotten better with age. Mentally, he is one of the most put-together fighters to enter a ring. Whatever his career's place in boxing history, Hopkins's career after the age of 35 is perhaps the best ever. Perhaps it is his prison record, his executioner's mask, his un-PC remarks about his opponents' ethnicity or his predictions of their deaths. For whatever reason, Bernard Hopkins hasn't been given the respect due him. With defeats of Antonio Tarver and Winky Wright after the age of 40, Hopkins has taken that respect.

Had the United States imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in 1984-style reeducation camps after occupying the Middle Eastern nation, John Kerry would have been among the first to scream bloody murder. But in a real, rather than hypothetical example of this, North Vietnam's ghastly reeducation camps that outlived the Vietnam War by more than a decade, Kerry imagines it as much ado about nothing. You can count on liberals to be homers for the visiting team.

"[E]verybody predicted a massive bloodbath in Vietnam," John Kerry explained to a C-SPAN caller. "There was not a massive bloodbath in Vietnam. There were reeducation camps, and they weren't pretty and, you know, nobody, you know, likes that kind of outcome. But on the other hand, I've met lot of people today who were in those education camps, who are thriving in the Vietnam of today."

The first part of the statement is true enough. After the purge of Trotskyites and other devationists by He Who Enlightens, the actual Vietnamese bloodbath in the 1950s, and the massacre of 3,000 people in Hue (about eight My Lai massacres) in 1968, the prospect of a Communist victory seemed to hold the certainty of widespread massacre. It didn't, at least on the scale anticipated, occur. There wasn't a "massive bloodbath," but it should be enough to spark the senator's ire that the Communists murdered people. The last part of Kerry's statement is especially bothersome in its obtuseness. There really is no "on the other hand" with regard to reeducation camps. They are bad, and that's it.

By shifting from protesting U.S. policies to cheering on the North Vietnamese, the Left invested heavily--emotionally, intellectually, spiritually even--in the success of a Communist Vietnam. When it didn't turn out the way they said it would--internal oppression and external imperialism--the Left blamed the United States or acted as if the abuses were non existent. Some honest leftists called bullshiznit. Most famously, Joan Baez, highly-credentialled veteran of the sixties anti-war movement, courageously issued a letter of protest in 1979 on the abysmal human-rights record of the Vietnamese regime. Jane Fonda, Corliss Lamont, and other leftists viciously attacked the folk singer. But her charges were correct, and John Kerry, who should know better, now attempts to rewrite the history that even as far-out a radical as Joan Baez accepts. Whenever I think of how terrible a president George W. Bush is, I think of how much worse it could have been had John Kerry won.

In the late seventies, forty-eight Vietnamese prisoners sponsored a statement of protest that included the following: "If it really is the case that humanity at present is recoiling from the spread of Communism, and rejecting at last the claims of the North Vietnamese Communists that their defeat of American imperialism is proof of their invincibility, then we, the prisoners of Vietnam, ask the International Red Cross, humanitarian organizations throughout the world, and all men of goodwill to send us cyanide capsules as soon as possible so that we can put an end to our suffering ourselves. We want to die now!"

"But on the other hand"?

Whether any of the sponsors of this jarring statement are "thriving" in today's Vietnam, I do not know. I do know that the hundreds of thousands of human beings imprisoned for political reasons in Vietnam until 1986 weren't "thriving" then.

In a blatant ripoff of Borg Blog Radio, I offer Radio Free Flynnfiles. It's frequency crosses borders into every nation that boasts internet connections. On the playlist is the best song I've heard this year (with a tribalistic drum intro ripped off from the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs' Maps), Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors by Manchester, England's Editors, as well as The Beast in Me, a ditty that Michael Vick has been known to sing the morning after Ron Mexico has indulged in a night carousing, wilding, and partaking. Listen. Enjoy.

Editors--Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors
Tori Amos--Big Wheel
Jason Isbell--Chicago Promenade
Avett Brothers--In the Curve
Johnny Cash--The Beast in Me

The federal government has indicted Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick on conspiracy charges stemming from a dog-fighting ring. Methinks they fingered the wrong guy. If you remember, there was a woman who accused Vick of passing on some germs. He didn't do it. Ron Mexico, a mountebank who poses as Mr. Vick, did. Cursed the ne'er do well! This dog-fighting ring has Mr. Mexico's dirty fingerprints all over it. The Twinkie defense? The if-it-doesn't-fit-you-must-acquit defense? The burning-bed defense? It all pales next to the legal powerhouse that is the Ron Mexico defense.

The Democrats wouldn't have dared pull a stunt like this if Bill Clinton were still president, right? There are consequences to Democrat rule in Congress, like a proposed $10 tax on high-end cigars. Currently, the tax is about five cents per cigar. "I'm not sure in the history of man, since our forefathers founded the country in 1776, that there's ever been a tax increase of 20,000 percent," notes Eric Newman, who operates an Ybor City cigar factory. "They had the Boston Tea Party for less than this." Luckily, for my wallet, I quit smoking cigars eighteen months ago. Unluckily for my happiness, it doesn't look like I'll be starting up again anytime soon--unless I win the lottery.

"Organization is an association based on authority, organism is mutuality. The primitive thinker always sees things as having been organized from outside, never as having grown themselves, organically. He sees the arrow which he has carved, he knows how it came into existence and how it was set in motion. So he asks of everything he sees, who made it and who sets it in motion. He inquires after the creation of every form of life, the authors of every change in nature, and discovers an animistic explanation. Thus the Gods are born. Man sees the organized community with its contrast of rulers and ruled, and accordingly, he tries to understand life as an organization, not an organism."
--Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, 1922

The Bush Administration policy in Iraq is one that retrenches rather than rethinks. After the surge of additional combat troops did not yield the expected positive results, the president's top military advisors are talking about the possibility of even more troops. What happens when the next surge fails to transform Iraq into a peaceful, orderly society free from massive waves of terrorism? For Republicans who have imbibed the nation-building Kool Aid on Iraq, the answer is another, larger surge. It's never the premises. It's always the execution.

Rare are the moments when the president and his lackeys reflect on the false assumptions that got us into Iraq in the first place. Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction. It wasn't close to gaining nuclear weapons. It didn't have anything to do with 9/11. It wasn't poised to attack us. It wasn't a democracy waiting to happen. Demonstrably false assumptions constituted the pre-war case for invading Iraq.

Now that the fog of pre-war has lifted, it's easy for the seeing to see just how slipshod the administration's arguments were. That the administration doesn't see it, and continues to truck on--even to the point of suggesting more men and resources--suggests that the arguments for war might really have been rationalizations for war. Now our troops, and our wallets, pay the price. Spring was the deadliest three months for Americans in Iraq. It's not getting better. It's getting worse.

"We all want progress," C.S. Lewis once wrote. "If you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man."

Welterweight (147) has always been my favorite weight class. Most men aren't born giants. Extraordinary men come in ordinary sizes. If you're five foot nine or so, if you're average, and you really, really got into shape, you probably could make weight at 147. In other words, there are probably more natural welterweights than natural heavyweights, lightweights, or any other weight. This, I think, contributes to the vivacity of the division. But the welterweights, unfortunately, have yielded in recent years, for me at least, to the lightweight (135) and junior welterweight (140) classes. HBO's Saturday night broadcast proved that welterweight is back as the weight class in boxing.

The night started out with one of the sweetest knockouts I've seen in recent years (other candidates include Antonio Tarver's jaw shot to Roy Jones and Demetrius Hopkins blind clubbing of veteran Michael Warrick). Check out these YouTube clips of Kermit Cintron absolutely flooring Walter Matthysse. It was absolutely devastating, particularly since Matthysse is no cupcake. Cintron's knockout is the stuff of highlight reels.

The in-ring, action-hero Arturo Gatti graced Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall, hopefully for the last time. The co-author of some of the most compelling bouts in the last decade, Gatti at 35, and Gatti at 147 pounds, proved too old and too small to continue fighting. Saturday's antagonist, baby-faced Alfredo Gomez of Contender fame, outboxed and outmuscled the aged warrior. Even the presence of Mickey Ward, Gatti's antagonist in an unforgettable trilogy, couldn't breath life into his former foe. It's always sad to see the greats go, but in boxing the emphasis has to be on the sweet in bittersweet as it's always sadder to see them hang on.

The final HBO bout showcased the future of the welterweight division, the freakishly long Paul Williams, who outpointed fan-favorite Antonio Margarito. He reminds me, and everyone else, of Thomas Hearns. Williams stands at six foot, two inches, with a reach that doesn't end. If that's not enough of an obstacle for opponents, Williams never stops throwing. He let his hands go more than 1200 times in the twelve-round fight. They call him Paul the Punisher, but Pattycake Paul may be a more apt nickname. His punches are light, but one gets the feeling that the tork those long arms could generate would unleash some amazing power should Williams desire to shift styles from volume to power. Margarito, whose reputation has been made more by calling out great fighters than by beating them, cried foul at the decision. I didn't, scoring the bout nine rounds to three for Williams.

Floyd Mayweather, Zab Judah, Miguel Cotto, Kermit Cintron, Shane Mosley, Paul Williams--welterweight is a stacked division. And it will be even more so in the coming year, as undefeated Ricky Hatton may come up to face Mayweather and champion moneyman Oscar De la Hoya may come down to make his farewell match. One things for certain: prizefighters go where the biggest prizes are. With so many money fighters in one division, other fighters hungry for money will crowd the weight class even more.

It's Friday the Thirteenth! It's safer to listen to music in front of your computer than to brave the goblins and witches who thrive on this day, which means another installment of awesome summer music. Chiggity-chiggity check out:

Modest Mouse--Missed the Boat
Colin Hay--Are You Looking at Me?
Buffalo Tom--Three Easy Pieces
Ryan Adams--Two
Paul McCartney--Dance Tonight

"Right now, I could kill George Bush," announced Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams, who does not suffer from Tourette's syndrome, at a conference in Dallas, site of the last presidential assassination. "No, I don't mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that." Yasser Afafat, Rigoberta Menchu (who also is speaking at this conference), and this crackpot have done grave harm to the credibility of the Nobel Peace Prize. Something about George W. Bush brings out the worst in the Left. Rather than point out the obvious (that he engineered one of the most harmful foreign policy mistakes in American history), the Left overreaches. They call for his impeachment, for a war crimes trial, for his assassination. Had Democrats supported a more mainstream candidate in 2004, instead of a Massachusetts liberal, they would have saved themselves so much embarrassment. There is a better way of removing a president you dislike. It's called an election.

"In the biblical view, the state is no longer divine, and is not a church; it doesn't absorb the whole of our existence. A seperate source of spiritual awareness appears, moreover, to challenge its authority--the prophets in Israel, the Catholic Church in the Christian era. Most to the point, the king or emperor is neither the law incarnate nor a divinity to be worshipped; rather, in the phrase of Bracton, he 'is under God, and under the law.' The entire course of Western constitutional history has been a series of footnotes to this concept--attempting to translate its theory into practice."
M. Stanton Evans, The Theme Is Freedom, 1994

In 2000, John McCain was the belle of the ball, the Republican Obama, the "it" candidate. Times have changed. McCain laid off fifty staffers last week. A few days ago, Ron Paul revealed he had more cash on hand than McCain. Today comes news that he has fired his campaign manager, chief strategist, and the co-author of five of his books.

What happened? McCain championed the illegal-alien amnesty bill with Teddy Kennedy. He firmly positioned himself on the wrong side of the Iraq war issue. He got old. He turns 71 next month, and after five-plus years as a POW and numerous bouts with cancer, it's an old 71. On top of all this, he seems to have gone out of his way to insult the conservative base of the party, even though, if you really, really look at his voting record, he has been more in tune with that base than the other leading candidates.

Among the perceived top-tier of Republican candidates--Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and John McCain--perception is everything. Few volunteers and donors are attracted to these candidates by their stances on the issues. They support these candidates because they think they can win. Did you notice Hillary's pollster saying her victory is "inevitable"? He said this not because it is, but because creating this perception makes it so among people who are swayed more by a winning candidate than the best candidate. This same dynamic is true among Republicans, and it works in reverse for the McCain campaign. Instead of "inevitable" victory, the perception created by the havoc surrounding McCain's campaign is "doom."

The Straight Talk Express has hit an iceberg. Abandon ship!

Scientists found traces of pine, beetles, and butterflies at the bottom of a glacier in Greenland, suggesting that the climate of the arctic wasteland was significantly more temperate a half million years ago. Climate, independent of man-made pollution, changes. Just don't tell that to one of the global-warming cultists, who would sooner accept the idea that pollution from the Vikings' motor boats caused Greenland to freeze over.

I like my rock stars rebellious--Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his teenage cousin, Sinead O'Conner tearing apart a picture of the pope, Ozzy Osbourne biting off a bat's head. It's not that I approve. Quite the contrary, I disapprove. But when dirtbag is part of the job description, be the best dirtbag possible.

Can you think of anything more conformist than singing for the fad of all fads in ensemble concerts organized by a politician? I would say that I've never seen anything as lame as Live Earth, but I didn't see Live Earth, and I did see Live 8, so I won't. A who's who of the music business serenading Mr. Tipper Gore must have caused Frank Zappa to roll in his grave.

It's important to remember that it's a music business. Al Gore used the musicians for his cause. And the musicians used Al Gore for their cause--sales. When the world's the stage, chart positions rise. When Madonna, Rob Reiner, and all the fashionable people speak for your cause, the discussion ends and the social pressure begins.

Sing for Bangladesh. Sing for Kampuchea. Sing for Africa. But sing for state-to-state wealth transfers? Sing for the dubious idea that people are causing significant climate change? No thanks. When George Harrison organized the concerts for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden in 1971, charity, and perhaps raising awareness, motivated. Now, with Live 8 and Live Earth, the purpose is politics.

The bad news is that music can't save the world. Even if the planet were in jeopardy, which it's not, concerts couldn't rescue us. But they could make people feel better. The good news is that musicians can save themselves. They can start by not marrying their cousins, decapitating live bats, and ripping apart pictures of religious leaders. This would make them worse rock stars, but better people. Start there, and then maybe lecture the rest of us on how we use too much energy and drive too large automobiles.

President Bush yesterday commuted the 30-month sentence of former vice-presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby. On the one hand, Bush could have done worse in the eyes of his critics: he could have granted a full pardon. A commutation gets Scooter out of a lengthy prison term, but he still has this stain on his record. On the other hand, the president has been very stingy with pardons, commutations, clemency, and other such powers. For garden-variety felons, the Christmastime tradition of pardons and commutations hasn't been much of a tradition during the Bush presidency. But for one of his cronies, Bush quickly dipped his dry commutation pen into the inkwell. Perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators, all those things that really, really mattered to Republicans during Whitewater/Monicagate, and didn't really matter to Democrats, now don't really matter that much for Republicans and really, really matter for Democrats.

Isn't it a good thing that Mexicans and not Muslims are clamoring to get into the United States? Mexicans boo Miss America and throw trash on the U.S. soccer team. But I've never known one to crash a car bomb into an airport. However corrupt their government, Mexicans aren't that different culturally from Americans. Mexicans don't speak our language, but they do practice the majority religion. The immigration problem in Europe is far worse. Aside from Zorro and a few professional wrestlers, Mexicans don't wear masks as a sizable portion of the immigrant population in Europe does. The immigrant population is culturally far more different from the natives in, say, England, France, the Netherlands, than it is here. Not only do many of the newcomers not want to assimilate, the governments, run as they are by mush heads, want to preserve cultural Bantustans for the immigrants too. Millions of Mexicans have ignored American laws to come here to work. That's bad. Millions of Muslims have obeyed European laws to go there to transplant their own rotten civilization and even support violence against the nations that give them safe harbor. That's worse.